The Pirates Of Pink Pants
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: Some pirates wear earrings and long coats, and some pirates wear fancy shirts and pink shorts. Or; what happened when Reddas spent an evening with Faris Scherwiz.


(Written for the SpringKink requests community; the prompt was: _Reddas/Faris Scherwiz, bonding over drinks, "We are much the same, you and I."_)

***

All roads lead to Archades - and the four winds will eventually carry all boats to Balfonheim. Reddas felt sometimes like a spider who had descended from one great web into another below it; he was shocked at how easy it had been to vanish into the seas, how even in plain sight, as Balfonheim's jutting cliff-head, no one in that world above had found him. Perhaps he was beneath their dignity now.

He wasn't the only man who had ever drowned his former life in the sea.

And they all sailed back to Balfonheim - by air or by sea, from near or from far, from _here_ or from...other places entirely. He'd come to know others. He recognised them, with eyes trained to discern truth or to impose it. Some would allow themselves to be drawn into revealing themselves - more so than, say, the captain of the Strahl. (The young, fascinating, lost, hollow captain of the Strahl, who knew damn well Reddas knew his past and would not admit to having such a sordid thing.)

This one? Was like the captain of the Strahl. They'd downed a quart of rum, of which Reddas had taken much the smaller quantity, and still no admission of uncertainty, of history, of anything behind that masquerade of bright colour and hard leather. Yet still he tried. "We are much the same, you and I."

"What?" Faris replied. "Sailors? Pirates?"

"Exiles." Reddas took another swig. "And all exiles are actors. We conceal our true origins with a frill."

Faris made a coarse sweep of sleeve to mouth. "Ye can keep your frills. Faris's _origin_," the word was mocked, spat, "Was on the seven seas."

"As was Reddas's," he replied mildly. "But a life is a sturdy and enduring thing, and it might outwear a name as it would a coat..."

His drinking companion looked almost thoughtful at that. Thoughtful, or perhaps finally drunk. "So ye say. But a name is more than just a word to call yeself."

"Aye, a name could be a mask complete; could be the brush of the artisan that shapes it; could be all we are, when we step upon that stage -"

"No stage. A swaying deck."

"And all your scurvy pirate lads a chorus -"

"Nae such thing. I'm a true pirate king."

"Yet you speak in rhyme, like a pantomime." He wondered how much he dared to see. "You're the principal boy -"

"Then ye's the dame."

"Ahoy!" A farce indeed; the leading man he knew best would have been more subtle in his jibes, even after this much drink. "Faris, you are merry."

The other pirate's head shook, earrings jangling. "I long ago learned that I could never be a pirate if I kept to _pinks_ and _frills_, Reddas."

He grinned. "Ivalice's seas are more forgiving."

Faris looked him dead in the eyes. "Is that so?"

Reddas fell silent, save for his fingers rapping on the table. _The sea lets us start anew_, he thought. _That makes her more forgiving than Archades. And much more forgiving than me._

"The sea is the sea," he replied. "She can be cruel yet rewarding, or she can be simply cruel. She can be cold but bounteous, or she can be simply cold."

"And at her worst, she is calm," added Faris. "But so we must live, with her greatness to remind us of our smallness. Her eyes always on us, even when we come ashore."

"As if we are her errant children."

"Aye, and she our mother and our father."

"Would that make us siblings?"_ If by adoption -_

"That I hope not." A hand gripped his; thin at the wrist, weighed down with bands of gold - a costume realer, perhaps, than the blue blood that he knew ran beneath that salt-smoked skin. He could accept that. Could he not also accept the offer it extended?

First, to know the detail of it. "Faris, what do you mean by this?"

The hand answered him before the voice did, with rough fingertips tracing a circle over the back of his own. There was a warmth to it, an honesty within the contact that he had never found in even the most tender touches of _that damned Archadian he should not be thinking of right now_. "I mean, Reddas, that there's no wench in pink-and-frills who I'd sooner take to my cabin tonight than you."

"Is it the drink that makes you forward?" He swallowed another mouthful, even so.

"Nae. It's your pretty words, is what. That, and what ye used them to say."

"What I..." He thought his way through the tangle, fuzzy-headed. "What is it I said?"

When Faris smiled, there were gaps and touches of gold. "That we have a thing or two in common. There aren't many souls who could say as much to me. Mayhap only me Hydra, and now you."

"I am like your beast?" The notion appalled, but appealed.

"Nae, she is like _me_. Ye can talk, Reddas, so ye should listen." Faris stood, close to steadily, close enough to pass for merely swaggering and not the worse for drink. "And I'll have none of yer mansion. Ye come to my ship at midnight, and may the sea rock us to sleep together come the dawn."

"That I shall." The earth moves for some, and the skies for others; they two were much the same, floating in a place between.

***


End file.
